Mary Antin

(1881 - 1949)

Born in Russia, Mary Antin immigrated to Boston with her family in 1894. Five years later, at the age of eighteen, she published From Plotzk to Boston, a collection of letters she had written her uncle in Yiddish during the family’s journey. She followed it in 1912 with The Promised Land, an account of her upbringing and assimilation; written when she was only thirty, it received critical acclaim and led her to a successful career as a lecturer on immigration and Jewish identity and as a progressive campaigner with the Bull Moose Party. “I thought it [a] miracle,” she wrote in her autobiography, “that I, Mashke, the granddaughter of Raphael the Russian, born to a humble destiny, should be at home in an American metropolis, be free to fashion my own life, and should dream my dreams in English phrases.” She was diagnosed with neurasthenia in 1918, and separated from her husband soon after he sided with Germany in World War I. Afterward she rarely wrote, and died of cancer in 1949.